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Chapter 34: Twitter Bot for Scraping Most Popular Topics and Influencer Profiles

Louis Lu

In this Chapter, I will walk you through how to create a Twitter bot scraping top-ranking topics’ data and influencer profiles. By the end of this Chapter, you will find that it’s totally free and you don’t need to rely on the paid software out there anymore. And most importantly, it’s easy to create and custom based on your business needs.

Table of Contents: Twitter Bot for Scraping Trending Topics and Influencer Profiles

Why Twitter Bot Is Valuable for Your Business?

As you might still remember, lots of studies focus on the skill of Donald Trump using Twitter for his political career. Since his joining in 2009, Twitter has become a tremendously popular platform to instantly share views, retweets, and comments with users’ real-time sentiment.

According to the latest statistics from Statista, Twitter has 206 million daily active users (DAUs) and in this user base, below are the top 10 Twitter users by country. Users love to reach through and discuss news, entertainment, and professional area topics as well on Twitter.

Twitter’s tweet and retweet volume are hugely large and the average visit duration on the web version of Twitter worldwide was nearly 11 minutes, although the tweet character length is shorter than other social media platforms. In terms of speed and news reaction, Twitter represents the real-time, latest trends and instant sentiment of users in a way in front of events and incidents.

In other words, the top-ranking content released by influencers, and sentiment data can give brands and merchants a hint of the specific topics of trend and true feelings from the user perspective. The question is how to scalably scrape these data from Twitter automatically. This is the value of a Twitter Bot.

Twitter Bot – Create a Twitter Developer Account

First thing first, you need a Twitter developer account, and it’s for free but it might take some time to get approval from Twitter. The reason we need the account is because of getting the Twitter API key and token used in the Twitter Bot Python script.

The Twitter developer API account has the free version and the enterprise version. We don’t need the enterprise version in fact, although it has a monthly limit in terms of tweets pulled, which is 2 million. It will reset on the 1st day of every month.

In terms of the account application, basically, you need to use an email address and submit the reason why you need an API. For me, it’s approved by saying it’s for software development.

Twitter Bot – Create A New App and Get the API Key and Token

Once you have the developer account, you need to first create a new App for the Twitter Bot project. There are 3 options and it’s no difference if it’s used for creating a Twitter Bot in a Python script. But I will suggest selecting the production which you can use for live products, such as the web application.

Then, you can get the API key and Token. Below are the 4 keys you need for a Twitter Bot. Please copy and paste them in one place first. You would need them in a moment.

  1. API Key
  2. API Key Secret
  3. Access Token
  4. Access Token Secret

Tweepy Module

Tweepy is an open-source Python package that gives you a very convenient way to access the Twitter API with Python. It includes a set of classes and methods that represent Twitter’s models and API endpoints, and it transparently handles various implementation details. They are such as data encoding, data decoding, HTTP requests, results pagination, streams, authentication, and rate limits

This module can facilitate you to connect with Twitter API and build up a Twitter Bot working for scraping the popular tweets and influencer profile data. Although you can directly code and connect with Twitter API using requests in Python, it would take you much time honestly.

For Tweepy installation, it’s very easy. Take Mac for example, you can just open the terminal and input “pip3 install tweepy”, then it’s done.

As well as other Python scripts, you just need to input “import tweepy” at the beginning of the Twitter Bot script.

For the details regarding Tweepy API documentation, here is the link

https://docs.tweepy.org/

Twitter API Connection, Tweet Search and Search Operators

First thing first, you need to connect the script with the Twitter API. Here is the code. I created the variables in advance, which are the apiKey, apiKeySecret, AccessToken, AccessTokenSecret. You can copy and paste the set of api keys you grabbed just now.

Now you have the connected api in the script, and below is the tweepy search tweet method you can use to define your object of the twitter bot. For more details, you can refer to the Tweepy API documentation to customize your bot for the tweet search and collecting data.

list(tweepy.Cursor(api.search_tweets(q, *, geocode, lang, locale, result_type, count, until, since_id, max_id, include_entities)¶.items())

From my point of view, there are three parameters you might use often.

q – query

Compared to other social bots, Twitter provides more deep-dive operator options to specify the search. For example, there is a match type mechanic, in which you can choose exact match or broad match as well as Google SEM ads, it’s very interesting.

Also, you can use hashtags as well as you use them in the Instagram bot. Or you could use mention either to find all tweets mentioning a specific Tweet account. It’s super helpful for you to either scrape the most popular content or the most popular account.

Result-type

This parameter can specify what type of search results you would prefer to receive. The default is “mixed” if you don’t assign a specific value to the method. Basically, there are three types

Geo objects

If the USA and Japan are both your target markets, this parameter would be very helpful to narrow down the search object. You can add the country code, or city name in this parameter value. As a result, the scraped data would be only from this country, or city, which includes the influencer profile data.

Scrapable Tweet and the Tweeter Data

There are two types of data you can scrape by using Tweepy. One is the Tweet data and the other is the tweet user data (influencer profiles)

Here is the variable with adding some useful parameters that you would need usually for scraping most popular content and most popular accounts.

Rename the Data Header

Tweepy API data is in a list format, instead of JSON format. By default, the column data header is named by numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Frankly, it’s not convenient to find or lookup the data later on in the business analysis.

So you need to use Pandas to rename the column name if you use Tweep to connect Twitter and build the Twitter Bot. Basically, you need to use the rename () method and column parameter.

Here is the code sample:

Full Python Script of Twitter Bot

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FAQ:

Q1: What is Twitter Post Scraper?

A: Twitter Post Scraper is a tool designed to extract tweets and related information from Twitter based on specific search criteria.

Q2: How does Twitter Post Scraper work?

A: Twitter Post Scraper works by utilizing the Twitter API to search and collect tweets that match the specified search parameters. It then extracts relevant information such as the tweet text, user details, and engagement metrics.

Q3: What can I use Twitter Post Scraper for?

A: Twitter Post Scraper can be used for various purposes such as social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, market research, competitive analysis, and content curation.

Q4: Is Twitter Post Scraper easy to use?

A: Yes, Twitter Post Scraper is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use. It requires minimal technical knowledge and provides a simple interface to input your search criteria and retrieve the desired data.

Q5: Can I extract tweets from multiple Twitter accounts?

A: Yes, Twitter Post Scraper allows you to extract tweets from multiple Twitter accounts. You can specify the usernames or search terms to retrieve tweets from specific accounts or topics.

Q6: What types of data can I extract with Twitter Post Scraper?

A: With Twitter Post Scraper, you can extract various data points including tweet text, user details (username, name, bio, location, etc.), engagement metrics (likes, retweets, replies), hashtags, mentions, and more.

Q7: Is there a limit to the number of tweets I can extract?

A: Yes, there are certain limitations imposed by the Twitter API on the number of tweets that can be extracted within a specific time frame. However, Twitter Post Scraper is designed to handle these limitations efficiently and provide optimal results.

Q8: Can I schedule regular data extractions with Twitter Post Scraper?

A: Yes, Twitter Post Scraper offers the option to schedule regular data extractions. You can set up automated processes to extract tweets at specific intervals or times, allowing you to consistently gather data without manual intervention.

Q9: Is my data secure with Twitter Post Scraper?

A: Yes, Twitter Post Scraper prioritizes data security and follows strict privacy protocols. Your extracted data is stored securely and is only accessible to authorized users. We do not share or sell your data to third parties.

Q10: What are the system requirements for using Twitter Post Scraper?

A: Twitter Post Scraper is a web-based tool and can be accessed through any modern browser. It does not require any specific software installation or hardware specifications.
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